The Way We Break

by Cassia Leo

  Liam walks out of the hallway and Kenny busies himself with dealing another round of cards. “What did I miss?”

  Kenny casts a furtive glance in my direction and the double shot I just drank spirals inside me. I down the rest of the bottle of Pliny I’m holding and set it down on the coffee table without answering Liam’s question. Liam grabs the three empties off the table and retreats to the kitchen for refills.

  I want to ask Kenny what the hell he meant by that. Is he trying to get me to call Houston? But that’s absurd. Kenny wouldn’t suggest something so ridiculous, not while hanging out with Liam in the house we share together. Would he?

  Liam is gone longer than expected, so I take the opportunity to try to get my answers.

  I tap Kenny with my foot. “What did you mean by that?” I whisper.

  He glances at the kitchen area to make sure Liam is nowhere in sight, then he sits up on his knees and leans in close to whisper to me. “I think you should call Houston and wish him a Happy New Year. He must be having a really hard time tonight. He divorced his wife, then he lost you again. He’s all alone.”

  I can’t tell if the burning in my stomach is the alcohol or the guilt. Or something else. But I quickly realize that Kenny’s right. I should call Houston, if not to wish him a Happy New Year, then I should at least call to make sure he’s okay.

  A loud pop from the kitchen startles me out of my Jim-Beam-slash-Houston haze. I look up just as Liam walks in with three wine glasses and a bottle of champagne.

  “Almost midnight,” he proclaims, passing around the glasses.

  As Liam fills them to the brim with bubbly, I imagine Houston sitting in his apartment, watching Ryan Seacrest (not on mute), drinking Pliny or probably Barley Legal all alone. We toast to a Happy New Year and I guzzle down my entire glass of champagne. The effervescence flows through me, bubbling inside me. It’s not like liquid courage. It’s like liquid happiness. I feel light and airy, bursting with all the things I want to say to Houston.

  I turn to Kenny and nod at him to let him know I’ll do it. I’ll call Houston. I just have to figure out a way to excuse myself.

  A few minutes later, I settle on the bathroom excuse. “I have to go potty,” I mumble. Or was that a slur? Am I slurring?

  I close the bathroom door behind me, my fingers fumbling over the wall as I search for the light switch in the darkness. Finally, I locate it and the bathroom is flooded with intense fluorescent light. I blink to clear the spots in my vision, then I splash some water into my mouth to clear the yeasty aftertaste of the champagne.

  Lowering the lid on the toilet seat, I sit down and stare at Houston’s number in my address book. Goose bumps sprout all over my body just thinking about calling him. Will he sound different? I know it’s only been about a month since I last heard his voice, but people change. Maybe Houston has changed for the better.

  It’s not until after I press the number and the line begins to ring that I realize it’s 11:59 p.m. It’s almost midnight and I’m sitting in the bathroom calling my ex-boyfriend instead of kissing my current boyfriend.

  What is wrong with me?

  I should end this call and stumble out of this bathroom to go tug Liam’s beard. Give him a sloppy drunk kiss. Just as I begin to pull the phone away from my ear, Houston picks up.

  “Rory!” he shouts into the phone.

  I can hardly hear him over the roar of celebratory cheering in the background. He must be at a party. How stupid of me to think he would be spending the holiday alone.

  I open my mouth to wish him a Happy New Year, but the sound I hear on the other end of the phone stops me cold.

  “Is that that bitch on the phone? Give me the phone, Houston!”

  Then the line goes dead. And so does a piece of my soul.

  January 3, 2015

  My first post-holiday meeting with Hannah Lee falls on a cloudy day when the dark sky looms heavy over Mountain View. As I ride my bike across town, I imagine reaching up and poking a hole in the fat clouds, the sky bursting open into a gushing torrent, washing me away into the Pacific Ocean. Of course, Liam might not appreciate my phone getting wet. Then he might be unable to reach me.

  Liam seems to teeter between perfect boyfriend and jealous boyfriend most days. I can’t decide if it’s because I made a mistake in telling him everything he wanted to know about Houston, or if it’s just that he’s really insecure. It’s probably a little of both. Either way, I think I need to just keep asserting my own independence while reassuring Liam that Houston and I are over.

  We are so over.

  I stop behind the white painted line of the crosswalk at a red light, thinking of what it felt like to call Houston and hear his ex-wife calling me a bitch in the background. It felt like my guts had been ripped clean out of me and tied around my throat, rendering me mute. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move, until Kenny knocked on the door, snapping me out of my despondent haze.

  The line had gone dead, but I held the phone in front of me, almost perplexed by the sight of it. As if someone else had dialed Houston’s number, not me. The alcohol in my belly bubbled like lava, scorching my throat. Finally, I powered off the phone and tucked it into the back pocket of my jeans before I opened the bathroom door.

  “Are you okay?” Kenny asked. “You missed the countdown.”

  Our eyes met and in that brief moment I imagined handing the burden of Houston’s lies over to Kenny, like a heavy shoe box full of old pictures and letters. And he would take the box and do whatever needed to be done. Burn it, bury it, hand it back to Houston. Anything to make sure I didn’t have to ever see it again. Then I realized I didn’t have to imagine this. I could give Kenny the Sierra Nevada box.

  Without uttering a word, I grabbed his hand and pulled him into my bedroom. As I retrieved the tin box from my nightstand, a sharp longing twisted inside me, urging me to look inside it one last time, but I resisted.

  “You can take this to Houston or you can get rid of it. I don’t care.” I placed the box in his slender hands, trying not to read the expression on his face as pity. “And never speak to me about Houston again.”

  He nodded and placed a soft kiss on my forehead before heading back to the guest room to hide the box. I slept fitfully for two nights. I dreamed of living in a house with transparent walls, which afforded me no refuge from a shadowy figure that stalked me relentlessly. I tried hiding under the bed and found myself yanked out from beneath it by the hair.

  I woke with a start two nights in a row, Liam reaching over to console me. I couldn’t tell Liam what had happened with Houston. He was blissfully unaware of the murky waters I’d been drowning in since that New Year’s phone call, but he threw me a life vest nonetheless. Didn’t ask me to tell him how I’d gotten myself into this mess. Just tossed out the lifeline and pulled me in, cradling me in his arms until I fell back to sleep.

  A car honks behind me and I set off toward Hannah’s house. Hannah Lee. Her name reminded me of a Peter, Paul, and Mary song my parents used to listen to when I was a kid, “Puff the Magic Dragon.” My parents weren’t even old enough to be hippies, but you wouldn’t know it looking at old photos of them together in the ’80s. My mom with her feathered auburn hair and bell-bottom jeans. My dad, a year younger than her, trying desperately to grow a mustache to make up the difference. Even though he was taller than my mom, you could see he was the younger of the two. He was always looking at her with the kind of adoration you only see in cartoons. Draw hearts in his eyes and the picture would be complete.

  I don’t know what happened to my parents. Why my dad felt the need to fuck my best friend. She was my age, for fuck’s sake. Maybe that’s the most sickening part of it all. Because it doesn’t seem consent was an issue. It’s that Hallie was just one month older than I was when their affair began. If he found her irresistible enough to throw away his entire marriage, what did that say about his taste in women? Or did my dad see more in her than just a young, ripe easy fu
ck? Was he in love with her?

  I can’t rule that out. It’s not as if I’m not familiar with how easy it was to love Hallie. She had guys falling all over her in high school. She had the most contagious laugh and she could drone on and on about sports and music for hours. When she loved something, a song, a sports team, a new hair product, she felt the need to shout about it. It must have killed her to have to keep her feelings about my father to herself.

  And she was such a planner. She had her whole life mapped out. She was going to move to Seattle and be a sports commentator for ESPN. Then she was going to coin a phrase even catchier than “cooler than the other side of the pillow.”

  She must have tried to come up with a plan for what would happen if I ever found out about the affair. But I guess, in the end, it seemed like too big a risk. She chose death over gambling with our friendship.

  The world is a worse place without her. Of that I’m certain. But I do have moments of doubt where icy fingers of anger creep up inside me, trying to flip the deck, until I’m silently blaming her for breaking up my family, just the way she feared I would.

  I wish I had the slightest fucking clue what I should believe.

  I arrive at Hannah’s vanilla and peach townhome on the east side of the city. The streets in this tract are lined with a mixture of young maple and eucalyptus trees. It’s obvious that the association maintains the neighborhood well, but I’m not sure how I feel about all these planned unit developments in California. It’s just neighborhoods of pretty houses, all indistinguishable from one another, where people seem to spend most of their lives indoors. You hardly ever see kids playing in the street. They’re all tucked away in their air-conditioned bedrooms playing video games or pretending to feel safe while chatting with strangers on the internet.

  News flash: The predator will find the prey wherever it may roam, whether it be in the privacy of an online chat space or outside under the butter-yellow sun. Might as well drink in the fresh air while it’s still somewhat breathable.

  God, I miss the clean Oregon air.

  I prop my bike up behind the railing on the small porch, then I ring the doorbell. Clasping my hands together, I rub my thumb in circles over the inside of my palm. I’ve never been more nervous in my life. Not even when Houston and I first slept together. I’ve spent the past week and a half since I met Hannah feverishly reading as many of her books as I could. I don’t normally read thrillers, so it was a nice change of pace for me. And, thankfully, they were quite addictive and fast-paced, so I was able to make it through eight of her seventeen books.

  She answers the door with her red lips pulled into a broad smile. “Rory! So glad you made it. Come on in.”

  I step inside and immediately I’m overcome by the scent of green tea and lemon. Glancing at a small console table under the stairs, I spot a scented oil warmer. The living space is cozy, with sumptuous oatmeal linen sofas and rustic ash-colored tables that look heavy and expensive.

  “I just put on a pot of coffee,” Hannah proclaims, clapping her hands together.

  She moves like a wraith across the dark wood floor toward the kitchen and dining area, her lithe arms and legs gliding gracefully as her beige cardigan billows slightly behind her. I follow her into the kitchen, where the smell of green tea and lemon melts into the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The machine sputters its last few drops into the glass pot as she approaches the counter.

  “I read your email,” she says, her voice reverberating off the white kitchen cabinets as she reaches for a couple of coffee mugs. “Your feedback was spot on. I was skimming over the details of the murder scene a bit, but I don’t think the readers will notice. Want to know why?”

  I place one hand on the cool marble countertop. “Why?”

  She flashes me a devious smile as she pours the coffee. “Because they won’t yet know what to look for.” She slides the carafe back into the machine and spins around to retrieve the cream from the giant stainless steel refrigerator. “You can’t give the reader all the details right up front. Writing is twenty percent telling, thirty percent showing, and fifty percent holding back. So, for instance, with this story you’re working on—your memoir—you can’t call it a memoir.”

  “Why?” I feel like a toddler, spouting off the only word I know in the presence of an adult who obviously knows way more than I do.

  “It has to be a love story based on true events,” she replies, handing me a cup of coffee with cream and no sugar. “If you call it a memoir, readers will examine your life to see how true it actually is and how the real story ends. And you’re not dead yet, honey.” She takes a sip of her coffee then continues. “If it’s a love story, the readers will go wherever you take them and, when the story ends, they’ll move on to the next one. You want to eventually write fiction, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you don’t want readers examining your life. You need to keep an air of mystery about you. Readers want to imagine you sitting at a laptop in your bathrobe, coffee rings staining your desk, hair sticking out in all directions, a cigarette leaning perilously over the edge of your lip. Let them hold on to that image whether or not it’s true.”

  I pause with the coffee mug pressed against my bottom lip, but I don’t take a sip. “Why?” I ask again and she smiles before she takes a drink from her steaming mug.

  “Lesson number one about being an author: You can’t allow another person’s opinion of you define who you are. You can’t allow readers or critics or interviewers to attempt to define you based on the bad decisions you made in college or the extra ten pounds you gained while writing your last book. Your work should be judged on its own merit, not on how hideous your skin looked in your last Instagram selfie. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  I suddenly feel my jeans getting tighter around my belly and my skin getting itchy.

  “Everyone will try to define you based on their own perception of you, but the only thing that matters is what’s between those pages. That’s who you are. Whether you’re writing fairy tales or spy novels. All that matters is the truth in the words.”

  I take a sip of my coffee to give myself time to think of a response, anything other than why. I can’t help but smile when I realize Hannah makes coffee as good as my mom’s. She would be totally creeped out if I shared this with her, but this small fact, coupled with this conversation about truth, has endeared me to her.

  “So, you mean, even if I’m writing fiction, I have to tell the truth.”

  She winks at me. “It ain’t rocket surgery.”

  I open my mouth to say, “That’s one of my dad’s favorite phrases,” but I stop myself. I don’t want to bring my dad into the conversation at our first meeting. She’s not my therapist.

  Hannah nods toward the dining table in the breakfast nook and we take a seat. “This may be a bit early, but I’d like to see what you’re working on. I think you’ll find a second opinion to be most helpful with stories that are close to your heart.”

  My skin tingles at the idea of her reading my story. “It’s not finished.”

  “I don’t mind,” she replies with a warm smile. “I probably won’t read the whole thing anyway. Just a few chapters to get a sense of the voice and flow of the story. If it’s any good, we can submit it to my agent with a proposal. She’s been looking for something fresh in the romance genre.”

  My hands tremble at the thought of Hannah and her agent reading the story of Houston and me. My mind races with thoughts of all the horrible things she can say about my writing. Or the terrible things she’ll think of me when she learns what happened with Houston and Hallie.

  No, she said she’d only read a few chapters. I’ll just remove the prologue, which shows the moment Houston brought me Hallie’s suicide note. If I delete that, she’ll start from the beginning of my obsession with Houston and she’ll probably stop somewhere around where we move in together. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll send her a link to a duplicate Google doc that
doesn’t contain the prologue.

  Then a sobering irony slams into me: My first attempt at telling the truth involves me hiding the most honest and raw part of the story.

  I have to let her read the prologue.

  If someone offered to help fix your stalled car on the side of the road, you wouldn’t hide the wrench before handing them the toolbox. You’d give them every fucking tool they could possibly need to help you.

  That’s what I have to do. I’ll send her the link to access the unedited document in my Google Drive. She’ll pluck the truth from the digital cloud and watch it blossom on her computer screen, live and uncensored. And I’ll wring my hands and try not to throw up as I wait for her to reply.

  January 5, 2015

  Toss me the bag.

  I hear the words, but they mean absolutely nothing.

  Seth repeats the sentence louder. “Hey, toss me the bag!”

  The scene before me materializes like a camera gradually shifting into focus. The cold concrete floor of the warehouse. The bags of grain stacked on the dead forklift next to me. The herbaceous fragrance of hops and the sweet nutty scent of chocolate malt settling around us in a cloud of dust. Seth, my warehouse manager, standing in front of me looking mystified.

  “Sorry, man. Must have drifted off for a second.”

  I grab a fifty-pound sack of malt and pass it to him. He tosses it to Hector, who then tosses it to Quinn, then the assembly line disappears into the grain room. The forklift that’s used to transport the pallets of grain from the warehouse into the grain room has broken down. Troy is already upstairs in his office calling our heavy-equipment mechanic to see how soon he can come out. In the meantime, we need to get two hundred fifty-pound sacks of Cascade hops and malt out of the warehouse to clear space for the next delivery of malt extract coming in less than three hours.

  My mind must have taken a vacation. It’s been doing that a lot since I received a text from Kenny this morning asking me to meet him at the Zucker’s store on Belmont. I didn’t bother calling to ask him how his New Year’s visit with Rory went. It’s been almost five days since then and I know I’m pretty well fucked.